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Authors: Vanessa Able
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km east of Mumbai, hadnât come a moment too soon. I had made the decision to swing by there instead of heading straight south to Goa on the advice of a friend back home who suggested I visit the Osho International Meditation Resort. Aside from the draw of its name, which appealed to me on account of the shades of a holiday spot implied by the word âresortâ, I was also curious about the reputation of the ashramâs founder, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho. Rajneesh, who shuffled off this mortal coil back in 1990, was more contentious than your average guru, and is popularly painted as something of a spiritual scoundrel, loved by many but also widely criticized. What interested me about Osho and his methods at thisparticular point in my personal development was his espousal of the principle of self-inflicted, controlled madness as an antidote to the greater lunacy of the world at large, and his concept that the key to true learning lay in the principle of unlearning our current conditioning.
After my brush with death by solicitude on the Yashwantrao Chavan, and the subsequent hullaballoo of Puneâs suburban traffic, it occurred to me that Osho might be just the man to help: in order to survive (and avoid a nervous breakdown), I might need to let go and revise everything I thought I knew about driving.
âThere are those to whom one must advise madness,â wrote French thinker Joseph Joubert in the nineteenth century; at that moment, while coming off the NH4 into the centre of Pune, competing with a bullock cart for a right-turning opportunity, I knew I had to be reconditioned. I was the square peg and Indiaâs roads were the round hole: I needed to take some sandpaper to my edges. For that, I decided to try the high road to psycho-spiritual liberation. It was time to hit an ashram where I could happily convene with my inner loon and prep myself for the next three months of driving like a bonkers bat fresh out of the belfry.
As soon as I arrived at the resort, a woman at the reception desk corrected my use of the term âashramâ with indignation that might have been excessive had I suggested the place was a whorehouse. This was not an ashram, she said, but a meditation resort. I wasnât really sure of the difference until I picked up the accommodation brochure and learned that rooms there cost about five times more than at the hotel next door. With a swimming pool, tennis courts, a choice of vegetarian restaurants and a vague reputation for a bit of howâs your father, this place was putting the Club Med back into meditation. Or was it trying to shoe-horn a bit of meditation into Club Med?
Even before I set foot past the entrance gate, I was interrogated as to my motives for coming to the resort, charged a hefty enrolment fee and subjected to a mandatory HIV test. This was followed by a trip to the boutique to buy compulsory maroon and white robes, without which I would not be permitted to enter the grounds. Once inside, I had to fight the urge to spend the whole day working on my tan by the side of the pool. A subsequent thirty-minute conversation with an inebriated Dane who cornered me with a blow-by-blow account of a gory bomb blast heâd witnessed at a nearby bakery a few days earlier was the motivation Iâd been missing to remind me of the psychic deconstruction I was here for.
I consulted the resort timetable: there was a Kundalini session coming up that would involve some free dance (mortified at the prospect, I was nevertheless keen to try, figuring Iâd be breaking down my conditioning by the truckload) followed by something mysterious called the âNight Meetingâ. Both sessions took place in a large auditorium at the heart of a giant black marble pyramid and involved working through a cycle of various forms of Osho-approved techniques: from dancing as if someone had slipped an Ecstasy pill into our veggie burgers, to playing musical statues, lying
After my brush with death by solicitude on the Yashwantrao Chavan, and the subsequent hullaballoo of Puneâs suburban traffic, it occurred to me that Osho might be just the man to help: in order to survive (and avoid a nervous breakdown), I might need to let go and revise everything I thought I knew about driving.
âThere are those to whom one must advise madness,â wrote French thinker Joseph Joubert in the nineteenth century; at that moment, while coming off the NH4 into the centre of Pune, competing with a bullock cart for a right-turning opportunity, I knew I had to be reconditioned. I was the square peg and Indiaâs roads were the round hole: I needed to take some sandpaper to my edges. For that, I decided to try the high road to psycho-spiritual liberation. It was time to hit an ashram where I could happily convene with my inner loon and prep myself for the next three months of driving like a bonkers bat fresh out of the belfry.
As soon as I arrived at the resort, a woman at the reception desk corrected my use of the term âashramâ with indignation that might have been excessive had I suggested the place was a whorehouse. This was not an ashram, she said, but a meditation resort. I wasnât really sure of the difference until I picked up the accommodation brochure and learned that rooms there cost about five times more than at the hotel next door. With a swimming pool, tennis courts, a choice of vegetarian restaurants and a vague reputation for a bit of howâs your father, this place was putting the Club Med back into meditation. Or was it trying to shoe-horn a bit of meditation into Club Med?
Even before I set foot past the entrance gate, I was interrogated as to my motives for coming to the resort, charged a hefty enrolment fee and subjected to a mandatory HIV test. This was followed by a trip to the boutique to buy compulsory maroon and white robes, without which I would not be permitted to enter the grounds. Once inside, I had to fight the urge to spend the whole day working on my tan by the side of the pool. A subsequent thirty-minute conversation with an inebriated Dane who cornered me with a blow-by-blow account of a gory bomb blast heâd witnessed at a nearby bakery a few days earlier was the motivation Iâd been missing to remind me of the psychic deconstruction I was here for.
I consulted the resort timetable: there was a Kundalini session coming up that would involve some free dance (mortified at the prospect, I was nevertheless keen to try, figuring Iâd be breaking down my conditioning by the truckload) followed by something mysterious called the âNight Meetingâ. Both sessions took place in a large auditorium at the heart of a giant black marble pyramid and involved working through a cycle of various forms of Osho-approved techniques: from dancing as if someone had slipped an Ecstasy pill into our veggie burgers, to playing musical statues, lying
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